Blackburn v. Paul: Maryland's High Court Says Pool-Fence Safety Codes Protect Even Trespassing Children
Maryland premises law has long had a cold rule at its core: a property owner owes no affirmative duty to a trespasser — even a child. For families of children hurt on someone else's property, that label, "trespasser," has ended case after case before it began. Late last month, the Court of Appeals of Maryland, the state's highest court, carved out a path around that rule for some of the law's most sympathetic victims.
In Blackburn Limited Partnership v. Paul, 438 Md. 100, 90 A.3d 464 (Md. Apr. 28, 2014), the court took up the case of a young child gravely injured in an apartment-complex swimming pool. The defense position was familiar: the child was a trespasser at the pool, and to a trespasser the property owner owed no duty of care — no matter what safety regulations said about how pools must be fenced and secured.
The court, in an opinion by Judge Adkins, confronted the collision between two doctrines. On one side, the traditional rule that landowners owe no affirmative duty to trespassers. On the other, Maryland's "statute-or-ordinance" rule: when a safety enactment is designed to protect a particular class of people, violating it can itself supply the duty of care and serve as evidence of negligence. Pool-enclosure requirements — fences, self-latching gates, barriers — exist for exactly one reason: to keep young children, who cannot appreciate the danger of water, out of unattended pools. The court held that those safety-enclosure requirements protecting young children could ground a negligence claim notwithstanding the child's technical trespasser status.
Why this matters
Think about what pool-fence codes assume. Nobody writes a fencing regulation to protect children who have permission to swim; the entire point of the barrier is the neighborhood child who wanders in. A rule that said "trespassing children can't sue" would strip these codes of their purpose precisely when they matter most. Blackburn aligns the tort system with the safety codes: an owner who ignores the legally required barriers cannot then point at the child who got through the gap.
The decision also fits a pattern in Maryland law of treating child drowning as a preventable public health problem rather than an act of fate. Drowning is among the leading causes of accidental death for young children nationally, and the entire architecture of modern pool regulation — barrier heights, gate hardware, latch placement out of a child's reach — reflects hard lessons about how quickly and silently a toddler can reach water. When a legislature or county council writes those lessons into law, it is making a judgment about who bears responsibility for keeping children out of unattended pools: the property owner who controls the barriers, not the four-year-old who cannot read a "no trespassing" sign. The Court of Appeals has now given that judgment force in civil litigation.
What this means for injured people in Maryland
- The "trespasser" label is no longer an automatic case-killer where a code violation designed to protect a class of people — young children foremost — caused the injury. Pool fencing is the paradigm, but the same logic reaches other safety enactments: guardrail requirements, smoke detector laws, and similar protective codes.
- The code violation does double duty. Under Maryland's statute-or-ordinance rule, the violation both establishes the duty the owner owed and serves as evidence of the owner's negligence. That transforms the case from a fight over abstract duty into a concrete question: did the property comply with the safety code, and did the violation cause the harm?
- Investigation is everything. These cases are won with inspection records, code-enforcement histories, photographs of the fence, gate, and latch as they existed on the day of the injury, and prompt expert evaluation. Apartment complexes repair fences fast after a tragedy; the evidence must be captured faster.
- Drowning and near-drowning cases deserve a hard second look. Families are often told — sometimes by the property's insurer — that nothing can be done because the child "shouldn't have been there." After Blackburn, that answer is legally incomplete.
Every summer, Maryland emergency rooms treat children pulled from pools that were supposed to be fenced, latched, and locked. And every summer, some family is told that the law offers them nothing because their child crossed an invisible legal line. The Court of Appeals has now said what common sense already knew: those requirements exist to protect children, including — especially — the ones who wander in. For apartment complexes, HOAs, hotels, and anyone else operating a pool in Maryland, the message is equally plain: the fence, the gate, and the latch are not suggestions.
We try premises liability and child injury cases across Maryland, Virginia, and the District. If you or a loved one has been hurt, call Posey Lebowitz at (202) 524-0123 or send us a message for a free consultation.
Part of our DMV case law archive, compiled in 2026 to reflect the archive of some of the most important decisions in injury law.